Fred Reed has worked on the staff of the Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times, and has been published in Playboy, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Harper's, National Review, Signal, and Air&Space. He has served in the Marines, worked as a police writer, technology editor, military specialist, and as an authority on mercenary soldiers. Get Fred's new book, Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well or his previous book The Great Possum-Squashing and Beer Storm of 1962: Reflections on the Remains of My Country. See Fred's homepage, Fred On Everything.

Total Cluelessness, and Other Chronicles of Washington: [02/11/08 ] Fraud is rife, I tell you. At a glance the citadels of power in Washington seem imposing. One thinks of imperial Rome, or the intergalactic empires of science fiction. Along Pennsylvania Avenue, on Capitol Hill, in Foggy Bottom, in monumental buildings in Federal Greek style, men and women of erudition seem to manage the world. Across the river in the Pentagon, spangled generals operate an inconceivably powerful military that can strike anywhere within hours of deciding to do so. At Langley in Virginia and Fort Meade in Maryland the intelligence agencies spy on the world, sucking in vast amounts of information from secret satellites and undersea taps and massive antenna farms. The whole enterprise reeks of inexorability and omniscience.

Eeeek! [01/31/08 ] A malign and poorly understood influence on foreign policy is the paranoid truculent male (though a few females share the ailment). The PTM is a fairly well-defined type, who believes that They Are Out to Get Us. He doesn’t much care who They are. If one They fails him, he will find another. These They must be fought to the death. It’s us or They.

How We Were: Chronicles of an Adolescence No Longer Available [01/08/08 ] You need to know about how in 1962 I was a half-wild country kid of sixteen in the wilds of King George Country, Virginia, and drove a derelict ’53 Chevy that shouldn’t even have started but in fact went places that would have terrified Rommel’s panzers at their brazenest. (You may think you don’t need to know this. Well, you do. It’s like, you know, real history, and American.)

Dulce et Decorum Est [01/02/08 ] I have just received the November issue of the magazine of the American Legion, in which I discover an article by one Ralph Peters, reminding me of why, having joined the Legion on impulse, I have never gone to the Post. The piece is entitled “Twelve Myths of 21st Century War.” A better title might be, “A Pedestrian Compendium of Agonizingly Cliched Jingoism.” (I guess he didn’t think of calling it that.) Anyway, Ralph believes that Americans have become too comfortable, have lost their taste for war, no longer want to pay the butcher’s bill. Ralph is for war. Not much for history, though.

Communing with Fidel [12/21/07 ] On Havana’s malecón, the seawall that parallels the shore, the waves roll in and hit the sudden obstacle, sending towering explosions of bright white spray far into the air, occasionally soaking the unwary pedestrian. Across the highway that follows the malecón is a cheap open-air restaurant, the DiMar. A steady breeze from the sea pours across the tables. A tolerable shrimp cocktail, topped with mayonnaise, costs a few bucks. On a couple of evenings I drank a beer there, watching Cuba go by. It wasn’t what I had expected.

Things Lost: Reflections on an Empty Time [11/29/07 ] A conceit of our age is that we are the apex of civilization, having advanced beyond all others, these latter amounting by comparison to mere foreshadowings of Us. In the sciences and their rampaging child, technology, we are as remarkable as we think we are. Yet it is as if all our mind and heart have focused on these, leaving nothing for other endeavors. Among civilizations we are as specialized as Sparta, an idiot-savant.

The Mayonnaise Cure [11/20/07 ] I am going to revitalize the American mayonnaise industry. Yes. Such is the patriotism rampant in this column. We will fill the nation’s swimming pools with the purest domestic variety, and then drown the entire staff of the public school system in it. I personally will tie cinderblocks to them.

A Craving for Tyrrany: Democracy--Good Idea, Didn't Work [11/08/07 ] Diversity. Always diversity. I learn that the University of Delaware has instituted mandatory indoctrination of students to make them appreciate diversity. Delaware is going to eradicate racism, sexism, and all. It's going to make the world safe for diversity.

Thinking About Intelligence: More Trouble Than It's Worth [09/19/07 ] I have decided that intelligence is pernicious, and should be extirpated. It just causes trouble. Practically every damn fool, deleterious thing our sorry race has done can be traced to intelligence. It is a bad idea. When it is not merely a bad idea, it is usually a waste of time.

A Dog to its Vomit: Chatoic Reflections on the Nation's Capital [08/24/07 ] I have just returned from two weeks in Washington and find myself almost giggling with despair, or perhaps chortling at the madness. I need a bottle of Padre Kino, maybe laced with Haldol.

I figure the whole country must be smoking dope, because they’ve all got the fears. Or so it appears at first. In stations of Metro, the city’s subway, a recording told us over and over that Metro had new secure trash cans and—I think this is verbatim—“You can now put your trash where it belongs without fear.” Yes, brethren and cistern, you can throw away that newspaper in a state of calm.

The Crimes of Jews: Pottling and Kettling [08/07/07 ] I get a steady rivulet of strange mail telling how horrible Jews are. Apparently there is no crime of which they are not guilty. I find myself wondering: How do they find the time to be so evil? Are they on amphetamines or something?

Spiderman Goes to College: See Spot Run. See Fred Run. See Fred Run Like Hell. Go, Fred, Go. [07/20/07 ] Guess: First grade, you’re thinking, right? Not a bad idea, really. Give kindergarteners Little Lulu comics, maybe Casper the Friendly Ghost, and they’ll be reading by first grade. Good idea. In fact, any number of kids invented this approach on their own. They learned to read, and there wasn’t a damned thing the schools could do about it.

Half-Assed in Haggledom [06/15/07 ] Why are Third-World countries poor, while those in the First World aren’t? (The phrase “third world” is a tad shaky, embracing as it seems to Taiwan, Thailand, and Mexico, and also Haiti and Zaire. We will use it for convenience.)

Mexicana de Aviacíon Gets a Frequent Flyer: Squirrel Cage to the North Needs Warranty Work [06/01/07 ] It was May 29 and I was coming through Houston on the way back from the Galapagos—kind of long-way-around routing, but what the hey. I’d gotten up at three a.m. in Quito to take the flight out so I was running on coffee and hope. My flight, Continental 2099, left at 2:20. I was ready to get back to Guadalajara. Swarm aboard the Embraer, fasten seat belt, haul out book.

Unfinding Brains: Everywhichaway but Right [05/10/07 ] It is a sunny morn, the wind is blowing over the lake, and I am reading a report from the Government Accounting Office. What a dolt. Anyway, the GAO says that fewer Americans are going into the sciences in school. Ah. And so the GAO, ever alert, boiling over with acuity, recommends…

Brains, If Any: Probably More Trouble than They're Worth [05/03/07 ] I don’t get it. Explain it to me. Intelligence, I mean. Everybody who talks about it seems to be slightly nuts. They get political about it, and then ideological, and stubborn, and unglued from reality. To start with, some people insist that intelligence doesn’t exist; they are, I suspect, the best evidence for their case. Some people and some groups are obviously smarter than others. It’s daily experience. Then other people, also imbeciles, say that environment accounts for all difference in IQ: It’s all in how you are raised. The idea would embarrass a hamster. Consider. Chuck Gauss, usually regarded as one of the world’s three greatest mathematicians, was born to a poor family of peasant stock in Germany. So were tens of thousands of other boys, all of whom, on the environmental theory, should have been among the world’s three greatest mathematicians. You see the problem. Newton, another of the three, was born into a family of small farmers. (The farms were small, not the farmers.) So was half of England. No method of fluxions from the rest. OK, that’s easy, but then I start getting confused. There is, for example, the correlation between size of brain and intelligence. Bigger is better, we think. It makes a certain intuitive sense. A big one should be stronger than a small one. But: Philippe Rushton, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, argues that blacks have a mean IQ fifteen points below that of whites because they have a brain volume less by 100 cubic centimeters; whites have an IQ about five points lower than that of East Asians because of a similar but lesser difference in the weight of the brain. (Rushton’s book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior, is worth reading. Amazon has it.) Others have argued that women, whose brains are a tad smaller than those of men, are a tad less intelligent. All of this tracks observable results. Rushton of course is charged with racism. If so, he is a white racist who argues that East Asians are superior to whites, which injects a certain political opacity. The confusion vanishes if you regard him as a scientist studying brains. Now, I don’t deny the correlation but, being as I am intellectually barefoot, I’m puzzled by this brain business. In biology books, one sees drawings that purport to illustrate the evolution of intelligence. For instance, you might see running across the page some ancient and by implication witless reptile (though, hey, maybe it read Kant) with a tiny brain, followed by a small ancestral mammal and then by primitive primates, then chimpanzees (with brains of 420 grams ), and then Man (sort of 1350 grams). The reader is invited to conclude that intelligence tracks the size of the brain in an orderly and evolutionary manner. But it seems to me that one could arrange the evidence otherwise. You go up the sleepy chain to chimps, which are perhaps smart enough to poke at low-hanging fruit with a stick. Then you come to Man, who does npn junctions and Lebesgue integrals and Dostoevsky. Then, continuing up the scale of brain volume, you find porpoises, with brains larger than ours (1550 grams) but quite dim, and then sperm whales, with gynormous brains (7800 grams) but no discernible theoretical inclinations whatever. Man looks less like the culmination of a comprehensible progression than a wild and inexplicable anomaly. Am I missing something? (“Yes! A brain!” I hear wits shouting.) At this point the partisans of IQ sometimes say that what matters for intelligence is not the absolute size of the brain but the size of the brain divided by body weight. Why? (Probably because it produces a straight line on a graph, but never mind.) On this reasoning, a man of 120 pounds with a brain of a given size should be twice as smart as a man of 240 pounds with a brain of the same size. I asked an IQist about this. He responded that what counts is not the weight of an individual, but the average for the species. Oh. My intelligence is determined by how much other people weigh. Why didn’t I think of that? I don’t get it. Some parts of the brain are used for thinking, and others are not. For example, people do not think with their brain stems, except perhaps news anchors. So why is intelligence not related to the absolute size of the thinking parts, independent of bodily weight? A computer has the same power whether mounted on an aircraft carrier or a little red wagon. A book much in esteem among IQists is IQ and the Wealth of Nations, by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen. The authors attempt to determine the mean IQ of different countries and correlate the results with national income. It is an interesting idea and seems more or less to work, sort of, mostly, when it does. I suspect they should have subtitled the book “A Study in Too Many Undeterminable Variables,” but who am I? (Since the book costs $93 at Amazon, I presume that the authors want to keep their findings secret.) Here as elsewhere in IQ stuff you can get into a lot of statistics and Gaussians and funny distributions, which enshroud the matter is a cloud of awe. However, it occurs to me that slick mathematics applied to soft data yield slick, soft results that would be dangerous if left on a sidewalk. Anyway, the authors assert that Equatorial Guineans have a mean IQ of 59, as for all I know they may. There is also in the lore of IQ Marilyn vos Savant, said to have had an IQ measured at 228. Call the numbers 60 and 230 for arithmetical convenience. That gives a difference of 170 which, at 100 cc per fifteen IQ points, comes to 11.33 times 100cc giving her a head with over 1100 cc more volume than that of the Equatorial Guinean. She would need a chain hoist to stand up, I should think. Or else the Guineans are nanocephalic. On a mailing list of IQ folk, to which I belonged, mention was made of Ms. vos Savant, whereupon a member posted that he had heard that she “stabilized at 180.” Now, a post on a list is not canonical. Still, it is interesting that no one demurred. If she stabilized at 180, then the IQ test was accurate only to within 48 points. Helluva test, that. And if both numbers were correct, then her head must have shrunk visibly as she subsided to 180, no doubt alarming her friends. (I think the elasto-cranial theory of intelligence is brilliant.) I’m being a smart-ass. Still, a lot of this stuff seems murkier than it is presented as being, more immobilized by ideological entrenchment and true belief. Wotthehell. Then there is what is called the Flynn Effect, (here or more elaborately, here) associated with James R. Flynn, who noticed that IQ was rising by three points per decade. It seems we are getting smarter, fast. Unless of course we aren’t. (The increase doesn’t show up in the mean IQ because it is pegged at 100.) Now, either the increase is real—that is, intelligence is rising rapidly—or it is an artifact of testing. If it is real, then (as everybody and his pet goat must notice) in 1945 the mean IQ of white Americans was 85, a full standard deviation below the mean today and exactly the mean IQ today attributed to American blacks. This means that a mean IQ of 85 is sufficient to manage the vast techno-industrial undertakings of WWII, to produce radar and Doppler-prox fuses and Bletchley Park. On the other hand, if the increase is not real, but an artifact of testing, then IQ tests are not accurate to within a standard deviation over fifty years in a single culture; this might lead one to question their application across very different cultures. Unless one were an IQist. Recently, Flynn has said that IQ is no longer increasing, that it rose because people were exposed to a more demanding intellectual environment as time went on. You know, computers and Game Boys and such. Fine. But this means that the environmental component of IQ has increased rapidly, specifically by fifteen points, and, indeed, one hundred percent of the difference between whites in 1945 and those of today is of environmental provenance. But then…but then…. I don’t get it. I guess I confuse easily because I came down out of the mountains of West Virginia with no shoes and twelve toes. It’s why we use base-12 arithmetic in Wheeling.

What, Me Twisted?: Politics is Weirdness Continued by Other Means [04/26/07 ] Over and over it happens, like incurable migraine. A public figure slips up and says something that One Doesn’t Say, something that upsets one tribe or other of the sacred and sensitive—blacks, Jews, women, homosexuals, American Indians. The offender is always a white male. The press attack him like hyenas dragging down a crippled zebra. Invariably, he apologizes profusely, squirming and abasing himself. Invariably he says he didn’t mean it, though invariably he did. Invariably he reminds me of nothing so much as a puppy who knows he shouldn’t have wet the rug.

Fleecing Uncle Patsy: Beats Working [04/11/07 ] Human ingenuity is a wonderful thing, especially when combined with the instincts of a pickpocket. The following is from the Daily Mail. “Tiny cameras the size of a fingernail linked to specialist computers are to be used to monitor the behaviour of airline passengers as part of the war on terrorism.” To find out whether they look nervous, see.

A Conversation with the President: Fred Admits Underestimation [03/21/07 ] Miracles do happen. I was astonished when President Bush granted my request for an interview. The truth is that I had almost forgotten making the request. As a matter of course in journalism you cover your bases, asking for all sorts of things that you don’t expect to get. The theory is that lightning can always strike. So when the current administration came into office I made the usual petitions at State to talk to Condoleezza Rice, at Defense for the SecDef, and so on. It was pro forma.

A Conversation with the President: Fred Admits Underestimation [03/21/07 ] Miracles do happen. I was astonished when President Bush granted my request for an interview. The truth is that I had almost forgotten making the request. As a matter of course in journalism you cover your bases, asking for all sorts of things that you don’t expect to get. The theory is that lightning can always strike. So when the current administration came into office I made the usual petitions at State to talk to Condoleezza Rice, at Defense for the SecDef, and so on. It was pro forma.